Doctoral research [1985, Vol. 12, no. 1]

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The Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 12, No. 1 Spring 1985
DOCTORAL RESEARCH
Maureen Berry, Editor UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
The theme running through this selection of dissertations has to do with various relationships between the state and the society it serves, or between different social groups, over time and in diverse settings.
Scardellato leads the way with his sketch of rural life in the Vale of Evesham: a scenic area long renowned for its market gardens. His analysis of the events which touched and shaped the lives of the villagers spans the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. The po-litical turbulence of those times drew most communities into con-flicts and Evesham was no exception. In 1265, the mighty Simon de Montfort was defeated and killed thereafter bringing about the most important event in Parliamentary history. Not only had he called on the knights from each shire to represent the rural nobility but, for the first time, representatives were summoned from the towns and boroughs. Scardellato's concern with the peasants of England's emerging democracy contrasts with Munktell's picture of what was happening then in rural Sweden: this time, however, from the much more advantageous position of the landlords.
Some 50 years before his chronicle starts, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark had been united by Queen Margaret. An independent feudal class was already well established, Swedish cities had start-ed to achieve some measure of autonomy, and the Hanseatic League was significantly influencing trading. Munktell outlines the trading activities of the land-based nobility, as well as the main functions of their manors, and traces the role of these estates as bases of economic power.
Four centuries later, the French establishment, which had already gone through a series of giant upheavals, was shaken again by the challenge of citizens' rights to state prerogatives. Owen takes us to the France of the belle époque, when, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and the Dreyfus case, an anti-clerical and pacifist socialist movement came to political power. With patriotism run-